[waterlesscloud]

But it's not.

Finland has vast, vast areas with no one. Texas has people thinly spread throughout.

You can cover only parts of Finland, because people only live in parts of Finland. You have to cover pretty much all of Texas.

So, once again, the size of Texas is a negative factor.

The so-called "average density" is not the key factor here, the amount of fiber you have to lay to reach everyone is.

[zzuser]

The above is an invalid comparison. A better, more objective measure is linear population density.

Miles of roads in Texas: 152,054 miles Miles of roads in Finland: 65,617 miles ()

Population of Texas: 25,674,681 Population of Finland: 5,375,276

Linear population density of Texas: ~169 persons per miles of road Linear population density of Finland: ~82 persons per miles of road

Ergo, it is cheaper per head to provide wireline telecommunications services in Texas than in Finland, when building out to the whole population, as the linear population density is higher in Texas and most, if not all, permanent residences and business are accessible by road.

Sources: http://www.aaroads.com/texas/ http://www.stat.fi/tup/suomi90/lokakuu_en.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas

() This road mileage does not include private roads in Finland. Including these roads would further lower the linear population density of Finland, but these roads were excluded from the calculation as the majority of the private roads are access roads to non-permanent recidency second homes and timer or agriculture roads.

[waterlesscloud]

This really isn't a good measure since roads will be denser in urban areas and less dense in rural areas, thus leading to exactly the same issues as directly using population density.

But beside that, the public road mileage for Texas is off by a factor of two. This DOT document lists 303,176 miles of public road in Texas. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/htm/hm10.htm

[zzuser]

> This really isn't a good measure since roads will be denser in urban areas and less dense in rural areas, thus leading to exactly the same issues as directly using population density.

Please be so good as explaining you point better, I do not understand it. If you are going to wire up every lot in the state, you will have to traverse all roads in the state to do a cable drop to every lot in order to do so. What does road density have to do with it?

When building wireline communication networks, the deciding factor costwise, is the number of linear cable sheet miles. As such miles of road is a good proxy for comparing deployment costs between locations.

Please note that I am discussing wireline broadband. If you have you heart set on wireless coverage, then we have to talk different measures, and even there population density is not the tell all metric.

> But beside that, the public road mileage for Texas is off by a factor of two. This DOT document lists 303,176 miles of public road in Texas. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/htm/hm10.htm

My bad. However that does not still make it cheaper to build in Finland, it merely brings up Texas and Finland to par on miles of road per population. Several things still favour Texas in the cost per capita, such as: economics of scale, ability to perform construction year around and no need to put utilities under the frostline.

There are no technical or cost reasons for Texas to be unable to offer the same level of broadband service as Finland. It all comes down to other reasons, perhaps such as lack of political will in Texas.

[waterlesscloud]

A number of different factors at play.

Imagine a layout where cables do not have to follow roads.

Imagine a layout where one cable can serve buildings on two roads. Certainly much, much easier when the buildings are dense.

Imagine a thousand people living in one building in the center of a thousand square miles, served by one cable. Imagine a thousand people living one per square mile in a thousand square miles. The population densities are the same. The cabling costs are not.

[zzuser]

Imagination will take you very far, and in this case, very far from the matter at hand. Texas and Finland are real places, not figments of imagination.

> Imagine a layout where cables do not have to follow roads. Imagine a layout where one cable can serve buildings on two roads. Certainly much, much easier when the buildings are dense.

Not very likely in the real world. Easements and rights of way are not available or not readily available among arbitrary paths. In any case, even if you were to cut through peoples back yards, you would still most of the time just be following a parallellish path to the roads.

> Imagine a thousand people living in one building in the center of a thousand square miles, served by one cable. Imagine a thousand people living one per square mile in a thousand square miles. The population densities are the same. The cabling costs are not.

These are real places we are talking about. Have a look at a map.